My choice for the best Animated Short Oscar is Hair Love.

There’s a great story about how this film got made in today’s Washington Post. The story behind the scenes deserves an award and maybe a movie of its own. An excerpt:

In 2017, Matthew A. Cherry created a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of funding an animated short film about a young black father who learns how to do his daughter’s hair. Cherry had been thinking about the project, dubbed “Hair Love,” for several years but was inspired to make it happen after seeing a flood of Internet videos featuring black fathers gingerly tackling the unruly tresses of their daughters.

Three years later, Cherry has an Oscar nomination for his vision, which audiences first saw in theaters ahead of “The Angry Birds Movie 2.” In just under seven minutes, “Hair Love” follows Zuri, a 7-year-old with a lively mop of kinky curls, who wakes up on a special day and tries to do her hair with the help of a video made by her mother, a natural-hair vlogger (voiced by Issa Rae, the creator and star of HBO’s “Insecure”).